August Edition

Hey guys, hope you’re well! In this edition of Teru-rambles-on-about stuff I wanted to talk about what I’ve been up to in the past month.  

The main thing is doing work on the mobile version of the site. I wanted to have it done by last week but things got a little more complex than anticipated. That, coupled with life not really giving me a break, has caused me to push things back a bit. I think I’ll have it done in a week or two and expect a write up then!

That said, that’s not all that I’ve been up to. I’ve been busy doing some work on the server to generally provide a faster and more responsive experience (ties in with the mobile stuff to a degree). I cleaned up a series of configuration files for our webserver software, nginx, and made so that under heavy load things should be better. Of course, we’re no where near using up all of our resources but I’m a bit obsessive about optimization at times!  

While I was at it: I enabled some of the latest ciphers and deprecated some of the insecure older stuff when it comes to serving secure content. As you can see from results, THP serves a pretty okay range of secure ciphers and has a relatively high browser compatibility. I could have turned off TLS 1.2 support but I kept it on for compatibility with perhaps older phones that haven’t updated their browsers. OCSP stapling was also enabled which makes requests faster as your browser doesn’t have to check if the certificate is valid upon connection all the time.  

It takes some time to read up and make sure I’m up-to-date in best practices but I think the end results are worth it. Even if THP isn’t the most popular site in the world, I think it’s very important to have a high standard of security and privacy. It’s also why there are no 3rd-party analytics on the site nor will there ever be.  

I’ll get off my soapbox before it collapses under the weight of my self-important bullshit, don’t worry!

There’s a far more practical issue that’s sidetracked me this month: that of THP’s sitemap. Here’s a quick rundown of what a sitemap is and why it’s important: web crawlers and indexers like google or yandex have bots that open up websites. They look at the content, how often it’s updated and follow and links. If they think it’s relevant according to their algorithm they then index it as a result. In short when you search for, say, “From the Scarlet Moon Flows the Spring”, the results depend on how well the site is and how relevant these bots think that a page with that text might be.  

A sitemap is kind of a companion to the standard bot crawl. It’s a list of links of pages on the site and how often they’re expected to change. There’s a bunch more window dressing but it’s important to note that a) it doesn’t replace automated crawling and b) it’s a general structure of the site. It’s only really critical to have in the case where pages don’t link to each other properly and can’t be discuovered easily. Like, for example, if threads are no longer on the board and are archived.  

Kusaba X does have an option for a sitemap but it’s pretty primitive and doesn’t account for archived threads. So I’ve spent some time figuring out a solution to include both old threads and new. Not only that but it’s would also be nice to have an accurate assessment as to how often content on those pages may change. Crawlers generally don’t like it if you tell them “all the time” from what I’ve read.  

I’ve more or less got my chosen solution partially implemented and I expect to roll it out with the other changes to the site soon. Oh, yeah, by the by, there will also be a few bug fixes and tweaks. Maybe even a new feature that I think is kinda cool. But that’ll have to wait until next time!

I could blather on more about technical stuff but I think I think I’m straddling the line between informational and outright dull as is. If you have any questions or thoughts, do let me know! Until next time, take it easy!